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The Spanish Affair

As a group, outline on your wiki how you would advise your students to respond in this situation.

Your high school Spanish students have been extremely excited about a recent project in your class. Students have been writing scripts and acting out “commercials” in Spanish for imaginary products. You have recorded the commercials on a digital camcorder and uploaded the videos to YouTube. The response has been very positive to these videos, and several students have uploaded them to their personal MySpace pages and blogs to share them with friends.

However, one of your students, Olivia, just forwarded you a comment written in response to one of the videos in which she participated and asks for help translating. The comment is in Spanish and contains several sexual references and curse words. When Olivia clicks on the commenter's username to find out more about the person, she sees videos with sexual content. What do you tell your students about the comment and what Olivia saw, and how do you advise them to respond?

Step 1: Dealing with the student

  • Thank Olivia for sharing the comment and linked video, let her know she did the right thing.
  • Take the student down to the school counselor. Talk with the counselor and student about the situation.
  • Talk to the principal about what happened. Decide how the parents should be informed of the situation.
  • Tell the principal and counselor how you are going to deal with the situation.


Step 2: Dealing with the video

  • Make the video private. In this way it won't be open to the public.
  • Disable comments on the video. Comments are almost always negative and inappropriate.


Step 3: Dealing with the project

  • In the future keep the videos private and always disable comments.
  • Include additional information about keeping videos private and disabling comments in the assignment instructions.

Step 4: Dealing with the students